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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24109522">no country here but war</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/spit_kitten/pseuds/spit_kitten'>spit_kitten</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Mad Men</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, draper typical attitudes, hurt/insufficient comfort</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-03 00:55:18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>16,528</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24109522</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/spit_kitten/pseuds/spit_kitten</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>This never happened, Don thinks, a little dazed. But what, exactly, had just not happened?<br/>Whatever it was, it's done, decisively whisked out of sight and shut away, smoothed over. This is why clients have always liked Ken, unfailingly preferred him to even the most committed boot-lickers. Campbell would bend over backwards to solve a client's problem; Kenny just doesn't seem to have problems in the first place, his sunny confidence – a smile, a shrug – simply repelling them. Call him a mark, but Don had assumed that the laid-back cheeriness was his default state, not a deliberate choice, until he'd stopped being able to turn it on at the office.</p><p>Chevy break the rules of engagement. Don tries his best. With cavalry like this, who needs the enemy?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ken Cosgrove/Original Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>40</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>no country here but war</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>"yet you will always live in a jealous society of accident…<br/>and they will not mind that they have let you entertain<br/>at the expense of the only thing you want in the world/you are amusing<br/>as a game is amusing when someone is forced to lose" ― Frank O’Hara, Hôtel Transylvanie</p><p>“How many times did someone have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?”<br/>― Michael Herr, Dispatches</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>'It's about the war,' one of Peggy's minions is saying.</p><p>'No shit, it's about the war,' Peggy replies. It still gives Don pause to hear Peggy swearing, even after all these years. He stands solidly in the doorway and raises an eyebrow. 'Is this work?' he asks. 'Because none of these ads should be about the war. Especially not Dow.'</p><p>Peggy turns around and says, 'It's not work,' in the new, detached tone of voice she's been using with him lately – part wary, part dismissive. She still smooths her skirt down nervously before she turns her attention back to the paper on the table. Don wishes that were more reassuring.</p><p>'America's foremost man of letters Kenneth Cosgrove is at it again,' Stan says round his cigarette, brandishing a magazine. 'Ginzo saw it'. It has a painting on the front – a meadow scene, all in greens and browns. Don reaches for it. Stan jerks his head up in a nod. 'Page 12. Dave Algonquin.'</p><p>Don stares at the cover and fights back the roiling sensation of discomfort that’s accompanied any thought of Ken since his trip out to Detroit last month. A painted pheasant stares back accusingly: he swears his stomach actually moves, lurching like he's just fumbled a catch. 'That's Ken?'</p><p>'Apparently. I'm amazed he has the time, what with the partnership and everything.' Ginsberg doesn't look up as he says it, and it's not the first time that Don hasn't been sure whether he's being accidentally gauche or deliberately unkind.</p><p>He resists the impulse to look at Peggy. 'What's it about?</p><p>'The war,' Mathis says, smiling proudly. Peggy sighs and rolls her eyes, reaches for her cigarette case. 'It's about,' she says, pulling one out, her eyes turned to the ceiling like she’s a spelling bee contestant, 'this man who wakes up on a bus handcuffed to this murderer and he can't remember why he's there, and then he has to try and get home but he's stuck with this guy. And no-one he meets will help him and then- '</p><p>‘No, it never <em>says </em>that other guy's a murderer,' Ginsberg chimes in, leaning back in his chair with a critical air, ‘that’s your assumption. He's just afraid of him.'</p><p>‘Well, yeah, because he’s got an ax,’ Stan says.</p><p>‘No!’ Ginsberg says, ‘Wrong again. He’s afraid of him from the beginning, before he gets the ax.’</p><p>'That’s because he's the war,' Mathis says, sagely, 'and the guy's father is Johnson.' He pauses, frowning. 'Now the girl in the diner, I think she's probably - ' Stan's shaking his head, chuckling and Peggy's blowing out a pinched stream of smoke and saying, 'I don't think it works like that', and Don wants to be in his office, with the door locked. He can feel his shirt just starting to cling to a film of cold, panicky sweat at the small of his back. 'Well, don't break up the book club on my account.' he says, too loudly over them. 'You can tell Ted why you don't have any work for him on Monday.' He pauses, horribly curious. 'Can I read it?'</p><p>'Yeah, I mean, I guess,' Ginsberg says, looking taken aback. 'Sure. I want the mag back though. There’s other stuff in it.' He narrows his eyes at Don, suspicious. 'I didn't know you <em>read.</em>'</p><p>'Don't let Pete see it,' Peggy says, 'or Roger. Or anyone really.' She looks somewhere between sheepish and serious. 'We shouldn't have told you.'</p><p>Don frowns. 'I'm not going to do anything with it,' he says, and hates how defensive he sounds. He doesn’t have to justify himself to Peggy. 'I like Ken.'</p><p>'Yeah, we all like Ken,' Stan says, not looking up from the board he's surveying. 'Chevy liked him so much they shot him in the face.'</p><p>Back in his office, Don sinks into the chair behind his desk like he's taking cover, and stares at the magazine a bit more. Somewhere above his head, the author is at work: Don tries to picture him, laughing down the phone to some executive or shouting at his secretary. His arms feel heavy as he flicks the pages, skims over the print.</p><p>
  <em>The light that filtered through the cracked bus window was weak, apologetic, painting everything outside a dirty dishwater gray, and Tom Lawrence thought, It's getting late. It's getting late and I've got to get home or He'll give me hell. But that wasn't right, because he had his own home, his own wife, his yard and the kid, and he hadn't had to worry about catching it from his father for fifteen years. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>He sat up and looked around at the bus, squinted at the unmoving bodies across the aisle. There were shards of glass in his lap and when he lifted his right hand to brush them away, he felt the cold bite of steel against his wrist. He stared at the cuff: there’s been some sort of mistake, he thought wildly, and expected the circle to spring open in apology, as soon as it realised its error. It didn’t. He tried to squeeze his fingers back through the loop of metal, tugging at it with his free hand, tentatively at first and then frantically, like an animal caught in a trap gone mindless with panic. The cuff caught at his skin, pulled it forward in wrinkles. </em>
</p><p><em>He was in decent shape for a man his age, had always taken good care of himself: he hadn’t realised at the time that those empty-headed early morning calisthenics were the closest thing he had to prayer, the ache in his muscles from those mechanical motions a physical petition to whoever cared to listen that at some point in the future when trouble came for him, he’d have done enough to be saved. He was in trouble now and it turned out that no-one had been listening after all: he’d been spending his sweat into an uncaring void. And though he felt, abstractly, that he was trying hard enough that he <strong>deserved</strong></em> <em>to get free, all his strength couldn’t get the cuff past the thick joint at the base of his thumb. </em></p><p>
  <em>Lawrence looked at it where it stuck, his bunched-up fingers awkward, like something half-born. Then he looked up at the man on the other end of the chain, and felt his lungs contract, as though the metal band was tight around his chest, not his wrist.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Christ, he thought, Christ.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Three weeks before Stan hands him that magazine, Don’s freshly back from Detroit, sitting in the partner’s meeting and making a proposal that has them all staring at him. All of them except Roger, who’s helping himself to a drink, which means he's all but out the door: he just needs one for the road. He pops the top off the vodka and pours himself a glass. "Are you sure about this?" he asks, his tone mild because of course he doesn't really care. "I like tall, blond and handsome as much as the next guy, but a partnership?' He grins, looks dreamily into the middle distance. 'Crane's going to throw a fit.' He offers the bottle to Don, raises his eyebrows in invitation.</p><p>Don tries to remember how many he's had and realises with a sinking sense of defeat that he can't. He holds out the glass and addresses his answer to the floating voters. Roger's going to say yes to anything that pisses off Cutler.</p><p>"A junior partnership. And he needs something, or we're going to lose him. And if we lose him, we lose Chevy, and we lose Dow. We go from being a serious ad agency to swimming in the shallow end again."</p><p>Chaough's looking at him intensely, probably trying to actually weigh it objectively and consider the good of the company, the bastard. "Well, when you put it like that..." He blows out his cheeks, and glances to Cutler. "When did one guy get so important? How'd we let that happen?"</p><p>'Important?!' Campbell's clearly been holding in a tantrum since Don first floated the idea and now he's going to blow a blood vessel. 'Ken Cosgrove is the farthest thing from important! He's the mediocrity's mediocrity, an all-American airhead, who has just <em>happened </em>to be in the right place at the right time. We lose him and we can just go out into Madison Avenue and whistle: Kenny Cosgroves are two to a dime! We might as well make Meredith a partner because she controls who comes in the door.' He turns his bluster towards Don, reining his outburst into that horrible serious affect he attempts sometimes - a man talking with men. As ever, he just resembles a poisonous old woman who's accidentally bitten into a slice of lemon: his round face is turning puce with indignation and his mouth is pursed and sharp. 'Don, you cannot be serious. Is this some kind of punishment? Are you punishing me? If I've displeased you in some way, then, please, out with it.' He leans back in his chair, in a display of disgust. 'But for god’s sake, don't scuttle the company for the sake of some petty interpersonal game."</p><p>For a blinding second, Don feels the cold glass in his hand and wants to bring it smashing down on Campbell's head, sees the way he'd sprawl forward, blood and whiskey pooling slickly on the glass tabletop like syrup on a pancake. How his face would fracture. "Pete," he says, keeping his voice flat and even with an effort, 'it could not have less to do with you.'</p><p>Campbell splutters, rallies, stabs at the table with his forefinger. 'I hope you remember what the existing junior partners had to do to earn their place around this table! Without me, there'd be no Sterling Cooper to hang an ampersand on. And Joan - Well!' He sits back in a cloud of self-satisfaction, clearly under the impression that he's dealt a killing blow to Don's proposal. "Well!"</p><p>Joan, who has been very quiet this entire time. Don looks over at her, expecting to find her shaken, remembering the way her eyes had burned as she'd stormed out of the room the other day. <em>I went through all of that for nothing</em>. Instead she's looking at him steadily, warily, her gaze a little watery but full of characteristic cat-like intelligence. 'Yes,' he says, and he's saying it to her, willing her to hear what he isn't saying, 'I remember.' She blinks: she knows something of it, suspects. That power of understanding of hers is downright uncanny sometimes. While Campbell, with all his so-called social skills, flounders and thrashes, she knows, he's sure of it.</p><p>'Did Ken ask for a partnership?' she says, quietly.</p><p>Don takes his drink. It's been a while since he's had so many of them looking at him so intently; he has a vague recollection of enjoying it, once, but then it all used to be so much more reverent. 'Not in so many words,' he says, slowly, 'but I think a token of appreciation wouldn't go amiss.'</p><p>Joan's lips remain set. <em>Just once it would be nice to hear you say we</em>, he remembers belatedly. But it's too late, and what's he meant to do? Tell them all - Campbell, Cutler, Roger - what's happening out there and let them vote on it?</p><p>He's the one who was there, who knows: he's fixing this; he's finally fighting for this, for himself as much as for Ken. He's done so much turning away and giving up recently, letting everything he thought he wanted slip through his fingers. He'd even thrown Chevy away, he thinks bitterly, had crashed petulantly out of Chaough's office and off the account, for all the good it had done him. If only that particular grand gesture had stuck; if only he hadn't taken up the pointless, belated offer of a trip to Detroit in an attempt to forget Sylvia's voice on the phone telling him no. <em>Every time we get a car, this place turns into a whorehouse.</em></p><p> </p><p>He remembers Midge laughing at him once when he’d rolled in, strung tight from a lengthy client dinner, and made the mistake of answering her half-mocking entreaties – ‘how was your day, honey?' -  in earnest. ’Isn't this stuff hilarious?' she'd said to one of her stoner friends - copper curls, freckles, pretty enough in a dissolute, dissipated kind of way - sprawled on the floor. 'Market share! Creative! Accounts! They just have that whole vocabulary so we don't realise how bohemian Mad Av really is. I should start calling all the whores I know 'account executives' - sounds so much more respectable.’</p><p>Pretty sly for Midge. Maybe her friend told the joke, Midge just laughing up at him from the couch, all glittering dark eyes and flash of bright teeth. Or maybe Midge was clever back then, before the world chewed her up. Her image has dwindled to a fleeting, ungraspable impression of shiny brilliance that skitters away like a roach in sudden lamplight whenever Don tries to pin it down, leaving only the clinging memory of that journey back to her apartment. Her flimsy ballet flat in front of him, empty, on the stair, too old and stretched out to cling to her ankle as she stepped. Her little girl voice saying "whoops," as she doubled back to shove her foot – no stocking, the sole dirtied – inside, taking the opportunity to cling to his arm for balance and smile inanely up at him. And all that just a precursor to the pathetic scene upstairs, with the transparent overtures and the junkie loser husband.</p><p>Things fall apart, lose their lustre, turn to shit in your hands. A flurry of sordid images flicker past Don’s eyes - Betty's listless arm on the bed, her downturned mouth; a mountain of orange ice demolished mechanically by Megan – lovely, sweet, funny Megan – in a burst of destructive cruelty; Anna, chalk-pale and faded, obliviously rotting from the inside out. It's a kind of sickness that comes in a million horrible disguises, but the end result is always the same – every time you think you've got a hold on people, they just wear away to nothing before your eyes, become brittle and empty and cold. The world wears them down.</p><p>He remembers the solidity of Ken’s shoulder under his hand, the warmth radiating through his crisp white shirt during an interminable Detroit lunch break, before their tour of the plant. What had Don been saying to him? Nothing, no doubt. How many times had he used a jocular shoulder slap to save him the effort, the energy of thinking of Ken Cosgrove for even the 40 seconds that a rejoinder would take to formulate. Ken's his favourite account man, and that's because he never has to think about him at all. While Roger and Campbell, both in their distinct ways, make pathetic entreaties, try to convince you to love them, Ken just does his job: he smiles, he drinks, he bites his tongue, he follows creative's lead in the conference room, and then he goes home. Home to his pretty, innocuous wife so that they can, presumably, sit on the couch like bookends, smiling at each other until the sun goes down.</p><p>He'd been getting up, leaving, taking an unneeded trip to the bathroom purely to get away from those Detroit morons. Ken had looked up at him from his place at the table, and smiled that wholesome, Saturday morning serial smile. The buttery yellow light had smoothed away the faded scrapes still lingering on his cheekbone, erased the dark thumbprint bruises under his eyes – all the ghosts of the crash that Don only really noticed at that very moment, when he couldn't see them. It was like he was looking at a different Ken, his round face boyish and open in the lamplight, like time had suddenly collapsed and Don was staring back into the good old days at Sterling Cooper, genially watching Cosgrove horse around with Kinsey in the bullpen, to the accompaniment of a symphony of secretarial click-clacking. That extravagant sound of unruffled bureaucracy - there was something else you didn't notice til it was gone, and the office was empty and still as stopped water. A single desk strewn with paper the only life-raft in a motionless ocean, a life-raft he'd found himself sharing with Lane Pryce and Pete Campbell, of all people. No sign of Ken Cosgrove: at the time it hadn't even occurred to Don to register those who'd been left behind on the sinking ship. They'd simply stopped existing.</p><p>Looking down at him in Detroit, Don had had the disorienting feeling that all of that had happened to some other person, like he'd seen it happen on a movie screen to a leading man that looked a little like himself, but sharper, younger, less goddamn tired. Usually it was looking at Peggy or Betty that gave him this tumbling feeling – a misstep in the dark on a familiar staircase – as he suddenly found himself unable to draw the connection between that bright-eyed past and the colder, harder present. Turns out good old Kenny Cosgrove's been quietly changing too: it had been dizzying to try and reconcile the pale spectre who'd been limping round the office last month, thrumming with nervous energy, with that oblivious kid. </p><p>That guy had radiated Homecoming King confidence, a cloud of complacent self-satisfaction that could drive Pete Campbell to the brink of apoplexy in seconds. That Ken had seemed tailor-made to chase secretaries and sit sunnily on the couch in Don's expansive, beloved office, ready to laugh indiscriminately at Kinsey’s pitches and Sal's takedowns - that startled, helpless laugh he used to have, as though each witticism, each good idea, each stroke of luck was just another of the universe's endless and endlessly lovely little surprises. The current model had accidentally thrown a mug of coffee against the kitchen wall a couple of weeks ago when Meredith shut the refrigerator door a little too loudly.</p><p>And it had been that Ken that had met Don at the airport, smiled wanly at the solicitous hostess taking their order in the arrivals lounge, and spent most of the relatively short cab ride to the hotel in pale, fitful sleep, mumbling an apology each time his head fell with a jolt onto Don's shoulder. The first three times, Don had been irritated; by the fourth, he'd been reluctantly, incredulously amused. 'If it's Cynthia keeping you up, your ‘phone bill's going to send Jim Cutler to the hospital,' he'd joked. Ken had kind of blinked blearily at him, making him think for a second that he might have fumbled the wife's name again, then given him a dutiful laugh. Placated, Don had gone back to looking out the window, and thinking of Megan and Sylvia, not necessarily in that order; Ken went back to sleep. In fact, he might as well have been asleep the whole evening: after grimly ordering a whiskey at the lounge, he'd been dour and uncommunicative, listening inertly to Don's brief description of things back in New York, his mouth set and silent. This had suited Don at first, but then the full implications of a compromised Ken had suddenly hit him and, staring down the barrel of a weekend in Detroit with <em>himself </em>as Chevy's only entertainment, he'd started to get a little unnerved. 'So what are your new friends like?' he'd asked, aiming for casual but also a little hint – <em>your job, remember</em>. </p><p>'Like 200 lb children,' Ken had replied, staring moodily into his drink. 'Whatever they want, they want it now. And they want everything.' He'd taken a long sip, before adding, artificially bright, smile turned down at the corners. 'And then, once they've got it, they like to destroy it.' Don had left him to his drinking after that.</p><p>But there he was at lunch the next day, looking for all the world like he could be sat in the break room at Sterling Cooper 1962, like he'd just broken off from another attempt to persuade Allison to come out and twist to tell Don about Accounts' latest conquest, eyes shining with self-satisfaction, maybe even some genuine excitement about the opportunity. He'd smiled just like that when they'd secured Aqua Net, barged into Don's office trailing a whining Campbell - 'just skip the production and <em>tell </em>me, Cosgrove, some of us actually work for a living' - and hollering for Freddy and Peggy; he'd poured two drinks, slid one to Don and, beaming, made the announcement with the beatific radiance of a triumphant football hero. If you went near him in this mood, he'd almost certainly throw in some fraternal back-slapping. Accordingly, Don had stayed seated, magnanimously favouring him with smile, a nod and a raised glass salute.</p><p>He'd been such a kid, with his open trusting face and that tangible, touching faith he used to exude - that they were all as happy as he was, all on the same team. Chevy hadn't been the ones to take that away from him, Don was sure, but it was certainly gone these days.</p><p>Don had found it amusing at the time, and had been even more amused when Peggy, smiling her shy little smile, had accepted a drink of her own from Freddy and cradled it near her chest in her tiny hand for a good five minutes before taking her first sip with a little shiver - part delight, part disgust. Later she'd dared to take a seat, neatly, on the couch with the rest of the team and listen to Kinsey extemporise. In her tucked away smile Don had recognised the exact strain of triumph - private, tamped-down, outwardly nonchalant – that he had felt when he'd first got that couch, when people had started coming in to see him, rather than the other way round. He wishes he could remember what color it was.</p><p>'Hurry back,' Ken – who wasn't in a long ago ad agency office but there with Don in 1968, stuck in Detroit and still somehow smiling – had said cheerily, knocking Don out of the past. 'I can't entertain these guys all by myself.' Don had smiled back, off-kilter, bemused, slapped him on the shoulder, and walked away.</p><p> </p><p>It's somebody's birthday, that evening, in the lamp-lit restaurant. The Chevy morons are arguing interminably about something – filleting techniques? God, really? Ken's gamely playing the ingenu, laughingly professing ignorance even though he usually never shuts up about growing up on a farm, and another table off in the corner is singing Happy Birthday. Don's drunk enough to be thinking <em>God, everyone's getting older</em>, when a champagne bottle is violently popped.</p><p>The champagne fizzles, the cork sails across the restaurant, a dark, exuberant little missile, a woman shrieks with delight, the Chevy morons whoop and cheer, and Ken, lifting his drink to his mouth, startles like a deer and slops watered-down scotch over his hand onto the table. Spreading wetness eats away at the tablecloth, white linen going thin and translucent. Chevy whoop some more at that: the one next to Ken throws an arm round his shoulder and slaps him thunderously on the chest; others slap his back. More of his scotch is spilled by all this fraternal jostling. He laughs weakly up at them, a hand coming up to cover his eyes in embarrassment – the quintessential good sport – and lets them paw at him.</p><p>Later, as the waiter takes away their plates, Ken gets up and excuses himself, unfolding his long legs from the booth like a magic trick and dumping his crumpled white napkin on the table. Don looks at it lying there like a dead bird and thinks about the clinging linen and whiskey stain underneath, then he gets up too, and lets the Chevy guys' jeering about New Yorkers who can't hold their liquor follow them both to the bathroom.</p><p>Ken's got a head start on him, and, Don can grudgingly admit, longer legs. He watches his colleague's narrow back disappearing into the dimly lit corridor to the men's room before him and notes the change in his stride, the easy, affable lope of the restaurant floor transformed in an instant into a genuine, head-down hurry. He has a sharp-edged memory of his own dizzying march down a different corridor strung with Christmas lights, the ghostly sensation of caught breath and a fumbled key glancing with implacable cruelty off the metal lock again and again, and quickens his pace. After all, there's no one here to see him.</p><p>He catches the door as it swings shut and follows Ken inside. He stops short: no attendant – God, Detroit is a dump – and the john's much smaller than he was expecting, strangely crooked, with the urinals and stalls lined up around the corner and just the sinks in line with the door. Ken's at the nearest one, leaning on it with both hands, but he whirls upright when Don enters and stumbles backwards, almost tripping over his own feet, bouncing off the back wall like a pinball. He has to grab the front of the second sink and slap his other hand against the tiles to stay upright. The door slams behind Don with a sharp crack. They stare at each other.</p><p>'...Hello,' Don says, cautiously, trying to pretend Ken isn't in a defensive crouch. Ken, wild-eyed, doesn't answer: it's unpleasantly bright in here, and the Homecoming King is nowhere in sight. This is unmistakably the other Ken Cosgrove, the weird, hollow-eyed phantom that Don half remembers tap-dancing in the SC&amp;P offices. Don eyes him nervously and reaches slowly into his breast pocket for his cigarette case. He sticks one between his lips and, feeling distinctly, ridiculously like a small boy trying to befriend a kicked stray, slowly offers him the case.</p><p>After a long moment, and with a visible effort, Ken stops looking quite so much like Don has him at knifepoint and gingerly takes a cigarette. 'Thanks,' he says, not meeting Don's eyes, and fumbles in his pocket for his lighter. Don grunts and puts the case away with a snap, waits for the flame, but even with one hand steadying the cigarette, Ken can't seem to get it to catch. The moment stretches out horribly, until it feels like Don's spent an eternity stood in this bathroom watching Ken Cosgrove's downturned lashes and trembling hands, the leaping pulse in his throat, insistent blood thrumming under the delicate skin. Finally, he steps forward and gently, firmly cups his own hand around the one uselessly holding the lighter.</p><p>Ken looks up at him, startled, and keeps looking as Don guides the flame, finally, to the cigarette and gets it lit. He keeps looking as Don keeps hold of his hand, drawing the lighter over to his own cigarette. He really is as pale as milk, those under-eye bruises standing out like ink blots on a shirt front, and while his eyes are still just as blue as they ever were, they're different somehow, something unreadable in them.</p><p>Part of the reason Don has always been dismissive of psychological research  - Dr Faye's thick dossiers, all death drive this and separation anxiety that – has been simple complacency. Maybe those psychiatrists aren't always wrong, but he just doesn't see the value in taking a handful of five dollar words to explain something that a good ad man should know in his bones. There's a secret language out there that everyone speaks whether they know it or not, a desperate aura they all project, some more than others - their fundamental insecurities, fear, desires. That's what everyone's silently saying, pleading, screaming when they evince a desire to buy a new stove, or nervously check their hat in a store front reflection, or drink too much: what's wrong with me? why aren't I normal? Why aren't I <em>happy</em>? The job of advertising is to magically, mystically tap into that silent distress signal, and, just as incredibly, answer it with the pattern of images, words and promise of material satisfaction that will, temporarily and for an appropriate discretionary charge, quiet it. The world has problems: advertising offers the solution. And there was a time, he's sure of it, when he could read that mystical undercurrent like some kind of ancient seer, when it was second nature to him. He could see a girl patting at her hair and know, like he was reading it on her forehead, that she was worried about her husband running around on her, or that the girl next door had just got a bigger, better refrigerator. He was the best, and now sometimes he can't do it at all.</p><p>He remembers reading in some journal on the train about a housewife who woke up one day and couldn't open her eyes. Nothing physically wrong with her, but the doctors said that the part of her brain that told her lids to move had just shut down, stopped communicating. Don's ad sense, once so infallible, feels like that now – the reverse of a phantom limb. Still there, but try as he might he can't feel it, can't exercise it. He can look at Sally, or Megan, or Joan, and now apparently Ken Cosgrove, and just have no idea what's going on – that panicky, sweaty, stomach-dropping sensation that there's something terribly wrong somewhere, there's a gaping wound <em>somewhere</em>, and for all his fumbling he can't fix it, can't even find it.</p><p>Maybe he's not the one that changed; maybe he's just not the target demographic anymore. More and more it feels like his life has only ever been on loan – and not just in the obvious way. Everything's passing into the hands of a different generation, the grasping, greedy tide of the oncoming future that looks exactly like Michael Ginsberg. Or worse, Chaough, with his colourful shirts and ridiculous boots. He thinks of Peggy again, her old-fashioned dress and apple-pie smile, as she curled her fingers round his on her first day because Don stood up for her, protected her. And now, she doesn't even want to work for him, had run straight to Chaough's office, into his hands. He'd felt it that day she'd made her little speech and left. Suddenly he was foreign, illiterate: no matter what solutions he threw at her, he couldn't seem to find the bleed. Every desperate grab for her had arched wide, a blind man clutching at the dark.</p><p>He releases Ken's hand, and it falls limply down by Ken's side. Ken blinks, then takes the cigarette out of his mouth and leans back against the edge of the sink; he shakily blows out a long stream of smoke through his nose, straight downward, like a sigh. Don turns away courteously, hoping he'll pull himself together and they can both go back to having a terrible time at the table, but there are mirrors on both walls and he can't help but catch a gesture that looks suspiciously like Ken's wrist dashed at his eyes. When he looks back, though, Ken's tiredly rubbing his brow with the heel of his smoking hand, so maybe it's just that.</p><p>'I don't know if I can stand it, Don,' he says, a note of hysteria in voice. 'I know I have to, and I'm <em>trying</em>, but... I don't know... I think there's -' He breathes, lifts his tired eyes, and looks frankly at Don, as though he's steeled himself to say something deliberate and important. 'I can’t take it out here. It’s killing me. There's going to come a point when trying's not enough, when it's not my choice anymore. I can - I can feel it coming.'</p><p>Don grimaces, that weightless, floundering feeling intensifying. 'They're pricks, Ken,' he says, eventually, 'but they're not the Viet Cong. Just... have another drink, for god's sake.'</p><p>Ken surprises him by huffing out a laugh. 'Have another drink?' he says, more to himself, or the wall, than to Don. 'And, what, think of England?'</p><p>Don's patience is finally expended. 'What do you want me to say?' he asks, hearing his voice go flat. He really does hate Detroit. 'Want me to tell you what a good little soldier you are? what a difficult, important job you're doing, entertaining some assholes? Fine! You're doing great, and you're going to keep doing great, because as you said yourself, that's your job. You're gonna stand it, because we pay you to stand it. You don't like it? Stop taking the money.' It's a bluff, he's surprised to realise even as he's saying it: the last thing he wants is another little part of Sterling Cooper – <em>his </em>Sterling Cooper, not Chaough's bastardisation – to walk out the door. But it's a bluff he's comfortable making. Chevy are bad, but they're not that bad, and Kenny's the family-starting age.</p><p>Ken just looks at him, something so strange in his face that Don feels himself softening, unsure again. 'I don't know what else to tell you, Ken,' he says, tired. 'You're good at your job because you do as you're told. And right now I'm telling you – you'll stand it.' He looks at his watch, partly because they have legitimately been in here a while now, and partly to escape Ken's bottomless, unreadable gaze.</p><p>When he looks up again, Ken's sighing, turning away to drop his cigarette stub in the ashcan, and resting his hands on the rim of the sink again. 'I don't know why I thought –‘ he says, then stops, flicks a look at Don in the mirror, bites back whatever he was going to say. Instead, he sighs and looks away, down at his hands. 'Thanks for the pep talk,' he says, and lets go to reach for the taps, begins mechanically to wash his hands like nothing's happened. 'When I crashed that car,' he says to the sink, voice light and even, conversational, 'at first I thought I was dead. And then I knew I couldn't be, because it hurt too much. And as soon as I felt that pain, I was so glad, Don. I was so happy.' He puts down the soap, ruminatively, laughs a little. 'Not even because it meant I was alive, not really – but because I knew that pain was my ticket home. I knew that I'd finally done enough, something I could show you all – finally found a metaphor you'd all understand. On the plane back to New York, I was so dizzy I couldn't stop smiling: I must have looked nuts. Then I hobbled around the office for a week, waiting for someone to say it – good job, thank you.' He turns off the tap, pauses, reaches for a hand towel, holds it uselessly. 'Stand down.'</p><p>He laughs again, weakly. 'The real joke,' he says, still not looking at Don, 'is that I offered to drive that night – I mean, sure, they loved it, but it was my idea. I guess I thought if I was at the wheel, they'd leave me alone.'</p><p>There's a silence as he dries his hands. When he speaks again, its obscenely cheery: he could be remarking on the weather, or introducing himself to a client. 'But then it turned out that my foot wasn't so bad after all, and here we are. Back to it, I guess!'</p><p>He glances in the mirror, fixes his hair and straightens his tie. This never happened, Don thinks, a little dazed. But what, exactly, had just not happened?</p><p>Whatever it was, it's done, decisively whisked out of sight and shut away, smoothed over. This is why clients have always liked Ken, unfailingly preferred him to even the most committed boot-lickers. Campbell would bend over backwards to solve a client's problem; Kenny just doesn't seem to <em>have </em>problems in the first place, his sunny confidence – a smile, a shrug – simply repelling them. Call him a mark, but Don had assumed that the laid-back cheeriness was his default state, not a deliberate choice, until he'd stopped being able to turn it on at the office. It's shocking to think that Ken Cosgrove, of all people, might have always had a rich inner world to which Don is simply denied access, like if one of the jubilant blond footballers caught mid-kick on the front of those old Saturday Evening Posts suddenly stopped beaming and told you about his old man's mean right hook or the first time he saw a dead body. He thinks about tiny Ken Cosgrove growing up on that farm in Vermont: in his mind, to the hazy extent that he's considered it at all, it's always been the bright photo-negative of his own childhood, the version of bucolic paradise that came out right. An angelic little blond boy in a red jumper, not unlike Gene, running amongst the storybook chickens and sitting in the barn door with a lamb in his lap, like a milk board advert. Gallant rolls away the snow from in front of the milking shed; Goofus turns over the topsoil and wishes he'd never been born. Gallant helps Pa distribute the chicken feed; Goofus holds the bottle while Pa gets kicked in the head by a horse. Goofus gets drunk over dinner and sleeps with his secretary; Gallant has one drink and goes home to his wife. But now, he thinks, he might have just been granted a peek at the reality, the flesh and blood under the black and white cartoon banality. He's seen the very edge of that foreign, interior country for himself, knows it exists, and he's also had the bracing experience of being shut out again, compartmentalised: it's like a steel shutter slamming down in his face when Ken turns to Don with a radiant smile and says, 'O.K.? Ready to face the enemy?'</p><p>It takes Don a second to recover from the whiplash and stir into action, to glance at his own reflection and stub out his neglected cigarette. By the time he nods and Ken pushes open the door there's someone else standing out there - one of the Jacks, he realises, from their table. He gives him his best client smile and, though he can't help but notice how ramrod tense Ken is next to him, he's smiling too, all surface reticence evaporated. 'Fancy meeting you here,' he says, his casual good cheer almost completely natural, and gestures, oh so polite, into the bathroom. 'After you, Jack,'</p><p>The big guy from Detroit laughs back, shoves his hands into the pockets of his shapeless suit. 'Nah,' he says, 'don't need it. I'm just the search party. You fellas were gone so long I thought I might be missing a show.'</p><p>Don cuts a glance at Ken, who hasn't moved out into the corridor, keeping them in this awkward triangular tableau. A muscle in his shallow jaw twitches as Don watches, but his eyes stay resolutely forward, refusing to translate that. Bemused, Don smiles at the Detroit idiot, whose grin is sharper than he would expect, almost sly. 'Sorry?' he says, 'I don't get you.'</p><p>Jack smiles wider. 'I see you don't!' he says jovially, and turns away, grabbing at Ken's shoulder with a heavy hand, dragging him out of the bathroom. 'Well, Kenny,' he says, conspiratorial, 'room for dessert? They do a great cheesecake here.'</p><p>'Whatever you say!' Ken says, with only the very mildest edge of hysteria, and heads off with him into the darkened corridor without looking back.</p><p> </p><p>At some point, maybe before the plane touched down in Detroit, maybe before it even took off, events had begun to spiral out of Don's understanding or control. There's something chaotic, a barely restrained violence hanging in the air, and Don's getting tired of waiting for the powder keg to ignite. Maybe it's just part of the Detroit experience, some kind of atmospheric imbalance: maybe it's always like this, and no wonder Kenny's so unsettled.</p><p>Right now, he's sitting quiescent across the table, more drunk than Don thinks he's ever seen him, with the flushed cheeks and shining eyes of a fever victim. He'd followed Don's earlier order with a mechanical efficiency, coming back from the bathroom and downing two generous servings of Canadian Club back to back – no watering down or substitution tonight. He's clearly not much of a drinker anymore (Don registers with another flutter of surprise, another sense of the earth suddenly jerking forward on its axis in one big leap – last time he paid attention, Ken Cosgrove was hardly abstinent) and it's hitting him hard. He's looking up at the explosive goings-on of the Chevy guys around him with a slightly dazed, guileless look. Don's seen him wear the same slow smile deliberately, insincerely, when he's trying to get clients (or, occasionally, Roger) to let down their guard: this looks like the real deal, his gaze a little unfocused, his head turning between speakers at a slight delay, brow pinched above the grin like he's concentrating hard. He seriously doubts Ken's actually processing any of the exec's braying. Don's still perfectly lucid and even so, he's not catching much.</p><p>There's been no reappearance of the earlier weirdness. Ken had strolled out of the darkness of the corridor and smiled at those idiots like they were his best friends in the world, and hasn't stopped smiling since. Don, on the other hand, has slowly become aware of his own increased edginess. He's angry, irrationally, at Ken for somehow infecting him, for passing off his nervous energy like a curse.</p><p>He just hasn't been able shake that feeling that he's missing something, that rot has set in somewhere, and if he takes an incautious step he'll put his foot through it. There’s something <em>seething </em>below the surface of the place: for a second, Don’s head is full of sweaty green undergrowth, his mind dropped back into an uncanny, swarming jungle he'd met once in Korea and sometimes felt he'd never really got away from. That had smelled of rot, too, a hideous fertility in its hungry shadows, and every second bristled with the promise of something sharp somewhere soft. And Ken <em>lives </em>here, he thinks, a stab of sympathy piercing through his resentment.</p><p>For the first time, as he'd watched Ken fold himself back into that booth, he'd registered the group of executives, – their size, their <em>noise</em>– as more than just an irritant, the movement of their huge, proprietary hands pulling Ken back in suddenly somehow aggressive, offensive. He'd taken his own seat, blessedly excluded from the knot of limbs and chatter, with a vague sense of unease that he couldn't decipher - a phantom shiver of loss and discomfort, like the jarring non-sensation left behind by a ring long worn and suddenly missing. Maybe it's just the disorientation that comes the dissolution of another thing – Ken Cosgrove's solidity, his implacability, his cheerful emptiness – that he'd been unwittingly considering a fixed value: without it, the world becomes another few degrees stranger.</p><p>They've moved on from the restaurant to the bar across the road. (There'd been movement towards the cars, but Don had quashed that idea pretty forcefully.) It's enough of a dive that the girls in here come shrouded in a cloud of ambiguity, each drink dropped off coming with the promise, for the right customer, of something more. And the group from Chevy are, it seems, very much known to be the right kind of customer: when three 'waitresses' wander over superfluously, there's little to no pretence that they're here to take anyone's order. Two are built on the Elizabeth Taylor model – dark-eyed, brunette, aloof – but Don's eye is drawn to the fairest of the three, whose long blonde hair is light enough to look Scandanavian and whose quick, appealing smile contrasts nicely with the closed-down, inaccessible smoulder of the other two. He thinks of Sylvia standing in her doorway, frowning, saying no, her body a barrier. The blonde catches his eye in amongst the barrage of compliments from the Detroit crew and leans across the table towards him, her curtain of straight hair swaying out eagerly, and introduces herself. Agatha: she is Swedish, and so very happy to meet him.</p><p>The girls are given seats, welcomed onto laps, slipping sinuously out of their waitressing responsibilities and assuming their other roles with a practiced grace. Giggling, Agatha slides in next to Don, while her two friends perch with varying levels of sensuous dignity on wide executive knees. With casual imperiousness, Ken's tasked with the journey to the bar instead. Don pays very little attention to the hubbub of demands that follows, distracted by Agatha's ready laugh and warm smile, and not particularly confident in Ken's ability to retain information accurately right now, despite his earnest nods. It's only when he stands up, though, that the alcohol's impact becomes truly unignorable. The second he leaves the safety of his pushed-back seat he stumbles, legs tangling like a new-born foal’s, and has to grab Jimmy’s shoulder to hold himself upright. He sways there for a second like he's at the edge of a springboard, face a blank. General hilarity erupts.</p><p>'Past your bedtime, Kenny?' somebody roars. Don turns back to Agatha, checking out of the spectacle and only dimly aware of the conversation that follows. As a result, he's taken by surprise moments later when one of them – if they're going to be with these guys for three years, Don really might have to start learning some names – stops close by him in the dark of the club and wishes him a good night. 'And good luck!' he adds, lasciviously, leering at Agatha. She titters routinely. The guy's got a bleary-eyed Ken by the waist. He looks like a marinated prom date just discovering for the first time that she's a lightweight. In the half-light, Don gets just a brief glimpse of his pale face, just a quicksilver impression of a last look thrown Don's way as Ken's guide tugs his leaden, drink-dull arm over his shoulder, repositioning him as easily as a child contorts a doll, and leads him away. After they've gone, that last look seems to float naggingly in front of Don's eyes – Ken's face set, shuttered, but something almost surfacing in his fever-bright eyes, something like a plea. Like the directionless fervour of a soldier in a foxhole, braced for the inevitable but praying for a miracle.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Lawrence's shoes were rubbing the thin skin of his ankles raw, his mouth was dry, and there was a buzzing pain in his head, somewhere behind the left eye. Worse than all of that was how his arm would sometimes brush against the bulk of man next to him, and he'd remember who he was tied to and what he could do and his stomach would contract, shivers would crawl all over his skin. Mostly the man stayed a little ways in the lead, drawing Lawrence's arm out uselessly in front of him. Whenever he raised his head, Lawrence's gaze would catch on the damp pink skin at the back of the man’s neck and he’d feel so frightened it made him ill.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>A dusty red car came into view behind them on the track. Lawrence was so glad to see it he could have wept. The man turned round and gave him a warning, but even though he did nothing to flag it down the car slowed to a crawl as it got closer. The man behind the wheel was around thirty, with a round face and a yellow polo shirt. During the week he probably put on a suit and drove his red car into the city: as soon as he got home he'd hose the dirt from his wheel arches and go in for dinner. To Lawrence he looked like an angel.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The car's engine kept running, and the angel eyed Lawrence suspiciously when he approached the window. The man next to him was silent and Lawrence suddenly remembered the ax from the woodshed tucked into the man's waistband, but he was so breathless with relief at the sight of another person that he couldn't find it in himself to be afraid anymore. Help was here. 'Yes?' the angel said, his tone peremptory, like Lawrence had botched his lunch order and owed him an explanation. 'How far is it to town?' Lawrence began, his voice coming out small and apologetic. 'I'm in a bit of a jam.' Help me, he thought dizzily. Let me get in your car and drive me away.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>'Really,' the angel said flatly. There was a set of golf clubs resting on the back seat, and he was wearing a reasonably smart watch with a leather strap. He looked like the kind of guy Lawrence might grab a drink with, looked like he could have been in his grade at school. He <strong>was </strong>in my grade, Lawrence thought passionately, his heart swelling with affection for this heavenly stranger. We were best friends, inseparable, and now he's going to help me out. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>But the angel behind the wheel was looking at them with something other than charity in his eyes. He's afraid of him, Lawrence thought and felt sick. He's scared of this bastard and he’s not going to help me. Christ.</em>
</p><p><em>'That's unfortunate,' the man behind the wheel said finally. 'but you're not so far from town now.' Lawrence stared at him, at the suspicion and disdain in eyes and the hard line of his mouth, then he had reached for the stick shift and torn past them. The shape of his car got smaller and smaller against the sun, then disappeared. Next to him the man laughed and Lawrence realised, the thought hitting him so heavily he almost stumbled and sat down in the dirt, that the man in the car had never even looked at his companion, had never seen the cuffs, that his disdain had all been for Lawrence and his torn jacket and his dusty, ill-fitting shoes</em>.</p><p> </p><p>One of Agatha's regulars arrives, and just like that, she's slipped away too. Don heads back to his room, in a cloud of alcohol and misery, aware only vaguely of the carpet in front of his feet, then the solidity of the door as it swings open and admits him into his temporary, tiny dominion. Everything's overlaid by the faded, increasingly unreal ghost of another hotel, other hotel rooms – Megan, singing, out in Florida, a whole new life opening up in front of him, all right and all his. He's heading for the bed, ready to lie face down on the coverlet and sink into this comfortably gloomy mental abyss until morning, when there's a crash, startlingly loud and close at hand. It shakes him out of his reverie and re-centers him in his body, in the present: Don Draper is in Detroit, and there's a noise coming from the room to his left. Ken's room.</p><p>He could leave it, but the vision of Ken's leave-taking back at the bar suddenly resurfaces, his unfocused eyes and wavering legs. He pictures Ken, tan suit jacket and gaping head wound, bleeding out on the bathroom floor of some second-rate Detroit hotel, pictures telling his smiley little wife about it, and doesn't like it much.</p><p>When Ken had led Don to the front desk earlier, they'd been all smiling eagerness to please, and had deliberately put him in the room next to Mr Cosgrove: Don had wondered if they already knew that Mr Cosgrove could be a constant feature of the hotel lobby for the next three years. He wondered if Ken himself appreciated it yet. They even had a connecting door, which Don found simultaneously quaint and irritating. 'Just in case you have nightmares,' Ken had joked - an unexpected flash of levity, his smile weak and wavery, like winter sun through cloud. 'Or you forget how to tie your tie. Just holler.' In reality, Don had left the chain drawn across, could only assume he'd done the same on the other side. Now though, he approaches the door at the far end of the room, listening out for more noise, and draws it back. He pauses, with his hand on the brass handle and feels pre-emptively exhausted at the possibility that he’s going to walk in on a robbery: there are more sounds, indistinct, and this <em>is </em>Detroit. He wishes he had something heavy. 'Ken?' he calls, too softly, jealously protective of his element of surprise. When no one responds, he pushes down on the handle and eases the door open.</p><p>As suspected, it hits the chain almost immediately, stopping short only a scant handful of inches ajar. But it's enough, and Don suddenly sees enough, that everything, the whole incomprehensible evening, clicks – finally, horribly – into place</p><p>A table lamp, the apparent source of the crash, lies on the carpet directly parallel to the door , shade askew and magenta glass base in heavy pieces. The bulb and wiring are still intact, throwing the little sliver of room into strange funhouse relief from below, all stark light and impenetrable shadow. It looks like an illustration on the cover of some pulp paperback, or even an ad, something weird and menacing like Ginsberg's Cinderella stuff for Butler - and Don receives it like that, a single image in one bright indelible flash.</p><p>The lamp has spilled from the low bedside table, itself over-turned, along with a couple of round bottomed glasses which lie there impotently, one in a pool of its own contents, whiskey soaking into the already off-cream carpet. Don could reach out and right it, could pick up the paperback that's lying awkwardly spine up on its splayed-open pages.</p><p>In the space between the wreck of the table and the bed, one of the Chevy guys – Jack? Frank? – has got Ken up against the wall. Pinned, his wrist slammed against the wallpaper above his head, legs kicked apart and Jack's weight against him: they could be grappling, Don thinks wildly, their jerky struggle could be the life or death spasms of two jungle combatants come across each other in the dark, both trying to narrow the gap between bowie knife and guts before the other can understand he's dead. They could be grappling, but they're not.</p><p>Really, all Don gets of the Chevy guy is an impression of his back, and rough movement.  His shirt, stark white in the unshaded light, has flopped loose at the back and is starting to darken at the pit; his shoulder holster flaps about, empty. One of his hands is closed with an obscene nonchalance on Ken's wrist: Ken's hand is a fist, tendons standing out sharply, pushing against the thin, pale skin of his inner wrist, and Jack's knuckles aren't even white, no strain at all.</p><p>All he sees of Ken is his pale, pale face over Jack's shoulder, head back, jaw set. His eyes gleam in the half-light, intense and dark and wet, cast blindly up to the ceiling like a statue of a martyr. As Don stands frozen in the doorway, he blinks, turns his head a little and suddenly, impossibly, they're face-to-face, a foot or so apart.</p><p>There's an endless moment where they hang there, suspended, as though caught in a flashbulb's momentary dazzle. Ken's face is slow to change, the mask of miserable endurance shifting into a more outright fear. Don's close enough that he can watch his damp eyes widen, see the moment his breath catches in his throat. He can't imagine what Ken's reading on his face in turn, but it clearly scares the shit out of him. Fractionally, but frantically, he shakes his head.</p><p>Don's slow to react, head too full of screaming static. Then there's a split-second where oblivious, noisy Jack starts to lift his face from Ken's throat and Ken's eyes get big and desperate and Don panics, pulls the door to as quickly and softly as he can.</p><p>He pauses there with the handle still turned down, heart pounding, for a second before he can bring himself to slowly release it. He feels a hot tide of nausea roll through him, like smelling alcohol the morning after a heavy evening, the same involuntary gag. Like there's a fishhook in his guts. The tableau he'd just stumbled upon – little Dick Whitman, with his eye at the peephole again – floats in front of his eyes like an afterimage. It doesn't seem real. Too stark, too strange: it could be an illustrated confrontation between an overgrown Hardy Boy and a particularly unsporting smuggler. For a minute Don is gripped by the absurd urge to whip the door open again, pop his head in and check his eyes. But then he remembers Ken shaking in the bathroom, the weight of his trembling hand around the cigarette lighter. This is really happening and, worse, it's really happened before. </p><p>Don couldn't guess how much time has passed when he's shaken by sounds out in the corridor, raised voices and Ken's door slamming. His feet move faster than his mind, carrying him towards his own door in a sick fury. He's not sure what he plans to do out there, although he suspects that his automatic impulse is to beat the living shit out of the guy. When he gets out there, he's thrown, blindsided yet again this evening, by the presence of not one, but two Chevy executives in the hallway. Jack and another Chevy guy are just outside Ken's closed door, reeling and laughing, and generally looking like they've just come back from a regular, if slightly riotous, night on the town. Jack’s still tucking in his shirt. The missing gun is in his free hand; as Don watches, he wipes it on the arm of his jacket, ostentatiously, showboating for his companion, before slotting it back in his holster. The other man is laughing, and they're both saying something, but Don can't hear what it is, can't seem to stop staring at the gun, their laughing faces, their hands.</p><p>They spot Don where he's gawping, and are thrilled to see him.</p><p>'Don!' the one who isn't Jack says, 'You're back early - no luck?' Before he has a chance to think about replying, the other guy steamrolls on. 'Forget about it! The girls round here are all frigid as hell.' He leans in towards him, grinning conspiratorially. 'Although there's places you can go where they've got a good reason not to be, if you know what I mean.' He nudges him, all-boys-together. Don looks down at his arm, thinks abstractly about ripping it off. 'Talk to Kenny. Kenny'll fix you up!'</p><p>'Might want to leave it for tonight though,' Jack says, voice gruff but distinctly self-satisfied. 'He's pretty far gone. Gonna have a real sore head in the morning!' He drags out the real like a goddamn hick, smiling like he's said something funny. The other guy exchanges a sly look with him, and this is a different modulation of conspiratorial: this time Don's on the outside, the innocent stooge. This is grimy little teenage hoodlums whistling at a kid in front of her old man – what are you gonna do about it? But before Don can turn that burning rage – <em>I know what you've done, you bastards, I know</em>– into words, or a punch, before he can even really feel it, they've bid him goodnight and turned away. They've breezed past him towards the elevator, all cock-of-the-walk swagger and self-satisfaction. ‘Seriously,’ Jack turns to say over his shoulder, ‘don’t wake the kid. Hell, let him have a lie-in. He’s earned it!’ The doors slide closed on their laughter.</p><p> </p><p>Just before Don's invitation to Detroit had come through, when the Chevy plant still felt like a fantasy, or a weird surrealist joke, they'd discussed the account at the traffic meeting. Pete had opened the file, looked down at it in that way he had, like any of them would believe for a second that he might have been too busy to read it beforehand. 'Ken called in yesterday: no change. The campaign's still stonewalled and will be for the foreseeable future. We might be getting closer to the model photos though – he'll keep us posted.'</p><p>Don had rolled his eyes but Chevy wasn’t his problem anymore. Ted, whose problem it very much was, had sighed explosively and even Cutler, so sanguine about the stall just a few weeks ago, had scoffed. 'Can't he <em>do </em>anything over there? What exactly are <em>we </em>getting out of having boots on the ground?'</p><p>Pete had sniffed. 'Apart from the campaign, Chevy seem happy,' he said as though the thought disgusted him, 'so I guess he's doing something.'</p><p>'Just not the kind of thing you can invoice for,' Cutler had said flatly.</p><p>'Like totaling cars,' Roger, into his drink, smiling.</p><p>Chaough had broken in, sounding uncharacteristically irritated – mostly, Don was sure, because the whole situation was testing his own optimism and he hated to admit it. 'I'm sure he's doing all that we can ask of him, Jim.'</p><p>'Well, frankly, Ted,’ Cutler had replied, eyebrows raised, somehow flat and emphatic at once, 'if it would get the whole thing over with, I'd ask him to get in Mikey O'Brien's lap, and bounce.'</p><p>There'd been a scattered noise of disapproval at that, Campbell decorously outraged and good guy, family values Ted acting as the voice of reason: 'oh, come <em>on</em>, Jim.' Roger had laughed.</p><p>'What?' Cutler had asked, raising his hands defensively. 'A week ago you creatives were all talking about how desperate you were for the Chevy stamp of approval! I don't see that anything's changed.'</p><p>Don thought of the machine-gun rat-a-tat of Ken's shoes on the corridor floor, <em>It's my job</em>. 'How did he sound?' he'd asked, more curious than anything, just trying to gauge how much of that little interlude had actually happened.</p><p>Pete gave him a look he would never have dreamed of directing at Don Draper just five years ago. 'Who, Cosgrove?' he'd said, with an air of confused impatience. 'How does he ever sound? Fine.'</p><p>'Look, the campaign's good - the <em>work </em>we're doing is <em>good</em>. They just aren't ready for it yet,' Ted had broken in, in the manner of a peacekeeper. 'Chevy's timeline may be arbitrary and infuriating, but as long as they're still happy when the clock runs down, we're home and dry in an instant.' He'd spread his hands reassuringly and Don had wanted to punch him. 'And Kenny's keeping them happy.'</p><p>'Right,' Roger had said, raising his vodka to point at Chauogh. 'Chevy's in the bag – everyone just keep doing what they're doing and we'll have Kenny home for Christmas. As long as they don't let him fly the plane!'</p><p>And that had been that. 'Any other current business?' Meredith had asked, and Don hadn't really thought about Ken again until he'd arrived at Detroit a week later to see him frowning in the arrivals lounge, smoking like a man condemned.</p><p> </p><p>At first, fighting the strange half-light, he thinks the room's empty. When he flips the main light on, he finds Ken sitting on the floor beyond the bed, exactly where Don just saw him: his back's against the wall, like he's just crumpled like a peeling sheet of wallpaper. He doesn't open his eyes as Don approaches. He doesn't move at all, except that his breathing is so fast and unsteady that it's shaking his whole body.</p><p>'Don,' he says between breaths, softly, hoarsely, in a tone that Don can't decipher – relief? trepidation? resignation? And then more urgently, 'Don, I think I'm going to be unwell.'</p><p>There's a hexagonal wooden wastepaper basket under the desk, which looks solid enough, and Don moves towards it and wishes, fervently, as he does so that he hadn't had that last drink: it's giving everything the unreal, underwater aspect of a dream. He stumbles, getting his feet caught up in something and kicks it out of the way – Ken's jacket. It lies on the carpet in a dark roadkill tangle, looking at Don accusingly.</p><p>Don sets the can down in front of Ken. It's been a while since he's deigned to play nursemaid for someone, but he's had it done for him enough times that he thinks he can work it out. Probably. To start off: 'I'm getting you a glass of water,' he says, decisively, more for his own benefit than for Ken, who just reaches blindly for the wooden basket. Don leaves him to it, and heads to the little bathroom. He's getting Ken a glass of water.</p><p>As he's filling a tooth-glass and grasping blindly for the next step in his head, he realises that one of his (many, recent) examples comes from Ken himself, when he'd taken him home after Roger's mother's funeral. With Pete Campbell. Jesus. He has a vague, slippery memory of Pete standing unnaturally in the doorway, just an uncomfortable shape in a thick winter coat, while Ken had helped him stumble towards the bedroom. He remembers pushing him away and staggering towards the sofa, and Ken backing away placatingly, hands in the air. 'Okay, Don, calm down. Jesus.' Then Ken had turned away, saying something to Campbell,' – yourself useful, Pete, and –' and Don had stared at the blur that was the back of his sandy brown head and brown overcoat as he missed the couch and pitched forward onto one knee, hard.</p><p>He turns off the tap, casts about for a towel. There's a mirror above the sink that gives him a scare, showing him a pale, clammy-looking drunken face, eyes small and tired. He doesn't really know what happened after that fall, spatially – just remembers Ken's voice coming towards him, a startled, exasperated 'Woah!'. He hadn't laughed, Don remembers, remembers waiting for it, appealing to the famous Cosgrove good humour, but Ken had been disconcertingly serious, face pinched in concern the whole time, even when he was just a dim shape on the edge of Don's vision as he'd harassed Jonesy in the elevator.</p><p>When Megan had woken him up he'd found himself in bed, a glass of water on the stand, shoes sat neatly next to each other on the floor. He doesn't remember what he said to Ken the next morning. It certainly hadn't been a thank you.</p><p>He can't hear Ken's gasping breaths anymore, a sign that he tentatively takes as good.</p><p>He’s done with the bucket: it's standing, smugly, at arm's length from him. He has his head hidden in folded arms, but he looks up when Don approaches, and the initial trepidation on his face is momentarily shocked away by the sight of Don Draper with towel and a glass of water like a waiter. 'Thanks,' he says, his tone almost wondering, when Don wordlessly passes him the glass. His voice is hoarse, <em>because of the vomiting, </em>Don thinks resolutely. He isn't going to think about any other possible explanation, just like how he's not going to think about how pink and swollen Ken's lips are, or about his untucked shirt, the button missing three-quarters of the way down. Or the gun, tucked away neatly, malevolently in Jack from Chevy's holster.</p><p>But if he doesn't watch while Ken – hair mussed and smudgy red bruises starting to bloom on his throat – downs the glass of water, he's confronted by the mess of the side table on the floor, or the door through which the Chevy guys have just left. It's all still in the room with him, everything he's trying not to think about: it's everywhere. Defeated, he sits on the edge of the bed and looks instead down at his own hands, uselessly holding a hotel bathroom towel.</p><p>In his periphery, he sees Ken finish, set the glass down and lean his head back against the wall, turning closed eyes up at the ceiling. 'Better?' he asks, keeping his gaze focused on the white fibres of the towel in his hands.</p><p>'Yeah,' Ken says, quietly. 'Stupendous.' There's a slight break in it and Don realises, with dawning, impotent horror, that he's going to cry.</p><p>'Want another?' he tries, desperately, already rising and reaching for the glass. Ken lets out a noise that's half-laugh, half-sob, and waves him off. Don sits back down, his diversion cruelly ripped away: if Ken stops letting him run around fetching him water and emptying buckets, they'll have to acknowledge that this isn't Mrs Sterling's funeral and Ken's not just had one too many. Don can't just take his shoes off for him and tuck him into bed.</p><p>And if he does think about it... Don edges towards it experimentally in his mind, and the immediate burst of anger is like being electrocuted, his whole body tensing, system locked up and flooded with adrenaline. His mind keeps skipping over that shared moment outside the door, Jack's concealed brag, the blatant disrespect. There's other things mixed in there – anger with Roger, for never giving a damn what they were doing out here, and anger with Ken, for letting them do it – but its the vulgarity, the disrespect that has Don so mad he thinks he might go blind with it. His gaze unwillingly catches on the stain on Ken's pants, where that son of a bitch had rutted against him, <em>marked</em>him, like an animal. A blinding, purple rage tunnels his vision and the quiet of the room – Ken's almost even breathing, the muffled sounds of the street, movement next door – fuzzes out to the sound of pounding blood in his brain. He breathes, in and out, carefully, and looks elsewhere.</p><p>'How long has this been going on, Ken?' He cringes at the horrible domestic phrasing and the seedy whiff of jealousy it connotes, but he has to know. Ken's been out here for months; when – <em>why</em>– did they begin to think this was on the table? Why wasn't Ken back on the first plane to New York at the first intimation of...this? God, how many times has he talked to Ken and not known? He thinks about the first day of the merger, the building suddenly crawling with CGC employees, bodies spilling out of every gap in the partitions. Roger must have mentioned that Ken was already in Detroit: Don couldn't have cared less because he was in Manhattan, feeling itchy and wrong inside his suit all day, something foreign and invasive and uncontrollable cropping up every time he turned round.</p><p>The Detroit guys are hearty to a man, outdoorsy and broad, and even the least fit has the kind of fierce gleam in their eye that makes a man remember he has a jugular. If they turned their sanguinity to business rather than pleasure, Don might even admire some of them. In a physical contest against any more than one, Ken wouldn't stand a chance. He lacks the killer instinct, Don thinks savagely, even in self-defence. Not just easy-going, but easy. Weak.</p><p>Ken's staring into the middle distance. He's lost all the edginess, all the thrumming energy that had him trembling earlier: now he just looks wrung-out, strings-cut. 'How long do you think?' he says, finally, and it isn't really a question. 'You really picked a hell of a time to take an interest in me.' His voice is bitter in a way that Don would swear he's never heard before, but as soon as it's out of Ken's mouth, he belatedly, retroactively identifies the same tone lurking behind mild-mannered comments he's heard him make at parties, behind raised eyebrows and understatement. He'd always assumed Ken stood at the back and kept quiet because he had nothing intelligent to say: has he been a diplomat this whole time? 'If Ralph hadn't been in the bathroom and Jack had been slightly less drunk, we'd all be having a very different conversation right now.'</p><p>The implication that somehow he's the one in the wrong here for giving a damn makes Don want to throw something against the wall. He could just as easily not, could close his eyes and walk away like all the others did with Joan. He still might, would give anything not to know about this. 'Would that have been so bad?' It would have been wonderful. He should have kicked that door down and killed them.</p><p>Ken sighs heavily. 'I honestly don't know,' he says. 'I've tried to picture what happens when – if somebody found out, if I told someone, but I just... don't know. I doubt it ends well for me though.' He looks over and meets Don's eyes for the first time in what feels like a long time. There's something hard in his gaze, and when he speaks again his voice is cold. 'These things usually don't.'</p><p>Don grimaces, and thinks, for the first time in years, of Sal Romano. That was different, he tells himself, and ancient history. 'Somebody has found out,' he says, lighting a cigarette. He's taking charge. 'Me. And I'll tell you how it goes. I'm going to go and find those sick bastards and I'm going to take them apart, right after I tell them exactly where Chevy can stick their supercar. Then we get on a plane to New York and never think about Detroit again.'</p><p> 'And SC &amp; Pete welcome us both back with open arms,' Ken says hollowly and closes his eyes. 'What'll you tell them?' This deflated emptiness is even worse than the sick, skittering anxiety of earlier, and Don can only observe it with grim fascination. He looks dead. Which just leaves Don in the field: if Ken can't stand up for himself, Don will have to do it for him. 'I don't give a damn what they think,' he says, moving to get up. He's done with this evening, done with Detroit, and he finally, finally knows what to do about it.</p><p>Ken's eyes fly open at the movement and he lunges forward clumsily and grabs Don's arm. 'I do!' he says, voice gone high and tight, eyes wild, imploring. Don's caught awkwardly, half-risen. 'Don, don't, <em>please</em>, I can't - ' he breaks off, just looking up at Don, but Don knows what he's saying, has heard it before from Joan all those months ago. Ken was there too, he remembers dislocatedly, recalls his wondering voice. <em>Holy crap, Chevy</em>. He wonders if he's thinking of the same moment, if they're both thinking about how easy it would be for Don to brush him off, stand up, and go out and take charge: <em>we're all rooting for you from the sidelines, hoping that you'll decide what's right for our lives</em>. The naked panic in Ken's face convinces him they are. 'Don,' he says, urgently, 'I'm not you, I'm not a partner: I’m an affordable casualty. If I get fired – and Chevy are probably the only people who <em>can </em>fire me – I actually have to leave.' There's a choked laugh in his voice, like he can't believe this is happening to him. 'And I'm not getting fired – I'm not getting arrested, for Christ's sake – for following orders. Not after all this.'</p><p>Arrested, Don thinks. Slowly, deliberately, he sits down. Ken releases his arm, and then there's a moment where they just stare at each other. It suddenly feels bone-deep wrong – somehow obscene – for Ken to be on the floor in front of him: something about their positions has Don's skin itching, his stomach turning. <em>You do realise I have no power</em>, he remembers him saying. About Chevy, he'd thought at the time.</p><p>'Get up,' he says gruffly. His cigarette's gone out. He concentrates on relighting it while Ken stares at him, then dazedly gets to his feet and, as though for want of anything better to do, goes over and picks up his jacket, holds it, looks down at his hands as though he's never seen them before.</p><p>'You can't just let them do this to you,' Don says, at a loss. 'You can't just let them win.'</p><p>Ken looks startled and then gives one of those bemused smiles, like Don's the idiot. 'Sure I can,' he says, 'that's my job.' He laughs mirthlessly. 'What's going to stop them? I'm nothing to them, Don: they don't want <em>me</em>- I'm just there. I'm always just there, a poker chip pushed around with Sterling Cooper’s compliments. Chevy are just the first place to take it this literally. If they want to... Whatever they want to do, it's my job to let them. If I can't stand it, I get fired.'</p><p>The last of the smile drops and his gaze floats away, past Don. He just stands there for a second, ghosts his fingers over his swollen lips. 'If you'd burst in ten minutes earlier,' he says, voice small, 'he'd probably have taken my head off.'</p><p>There's a second where that sits between them, ugly. Time stalls as Don's mind catches on the image, like a needle caught in a groove; suddenly, all he can see is a doorway, the world contracting in that horribly familiar way until the only way forward is away. Detroit is a dark room full of sharpened edges, and he wants <em>out</em>. He thinks of his flight tomorrow, and of his chequebook, heavy in his pocket. How much would Ken need to just slip out and start again? Out of Detroit, New York, advertising – get somewhere clean and bright. Vermont.</p><p>His mind races in the silence. Out in the corridor there's the brief sound of raised voices, a slamming door, heavy feet stamping down the corridor. It's like a spell's been broken and Ken's moving again, hurriedly fumbling at his jacket for his cigarettes. He lights up and sits down heavily on the bed next to Don, as though his legs have given out. Don deliberately doesn't watch to see whether his hands are shaking.</p><p>'Cynthia's pregnant,' he says finally, to the floor.</p><p>'Oh,' Don says, intelligently. He'd forgotten Cynthia existed. He remembers the pair of them at Megan's awful party, laughing at everything and only looking at each other. His chequebook stays in his pocket.</p><p>'It's early, but she's pretty sure.'</p><p>'Congratulations.'  If Ken stays here, he's going to die, and Cynthia's pregnant. Ken can't say no to Chevy, and if Don says no for him, makes it a company issue, Ken gets fired, or worse. And Ken can't get fired, or worse, because Cynthia's pregnant. Don suddenly feels very, very tired. There's a bed and a bottle of bourbon on the other side of that connecting door, and a room that doesn't smell like vomit and sex. 'What happens now?' His voice comes out flat and dispassionate, but that's a thousand times better than desperation. There's an answer here: they just need to find the right angle.</p><p>Ken scrubs a hand through his messed-up hair and sighs, in a gesture so patently inadequate – secretary misplaced a 'phone number, meeting pushed back, vending machine out of order –that it's almost funny. 'I'll keep doing what I'm told,' he says, dully, 'until I can't anymore. Don't worry – they'll probably blow my brains out by accident long before I get a chance to do it on purpose.'</p><p>Don frowns, unamused. 'That's not funny.'</p><p>'No,' Ken says, 'not really.' He sighs again, rubs at his eyes. 'Can you –sorry, Don, can you go? I need to wash up.'</p><p>Heading to the door feels shameful, like a retreat. 'Look at me, Ken', he says before he goes, turning back to the room. Ken looks up. 'You've been on your own out here but you're not anymore. I'm on your side,' Don tells him, tells the world, and get a burst of confidence. Fuck Chevy. 'This doesn't need to happen anymore. I'm going to fix it. I'm not going to let those bastards win. We will move on from this. I'm not walking away from you.'</p><p>Ken's coloring is still all wrong – all whites and lilacs – and his hair's a wreck, but despite that, despite everything, as he looks at Don standing in the doorway, there's something of the old hope in his face.</p><p> </p><p>'Well,' Roger says, once the partnership vote is out of the way and Meredith begins to wrap things up, 'Adolph Sprekels over here can be the one to break the news to Cosgrove. Things must have gotten pretty cosy over in Detroit: two weeks ago I would have sworn you barely knew the kid's name and now you're his sugar daddy? What did he do?' He'd remembered halfway through the vote that he didn't like Ken anymore and started sulking, but hadn't changed his mind. That little grudge still paled in comparison to his distrust of Cutler. Don tosses back the rest of his drink and focuses on not punching him in the face: he's just won this one, after all.</p><p>'If you've got any sense, Campbell, you'll try and find out,' Roger continues, getting up and swirling his vodka rocks. He pauses, pretending to think. 'You know what we used to call that candy before the war? Papa Suckers. Maybe that's a clue.'</p><p>'Roger, you're being disgusting,' Pete says, and storms out. He'd voted aye, too, to strengthen the Sterling Cooper faction, and has more reason to be sore about it.</p><p>'I guess gentlemen really <em>do </em>prefer blonds,' Roger aims at Don, unperturbed. Don's stomach clenches.</p><p>'I'm not doing this with you,' he says, and leaves, letting Roger's 'Aw, come on, I'm kidding' follow him out of the conference room. 'Get me Ken in Detroit,' he stops to tell Dawn on his way past, so busy getting away from Roger that he doesn't notice Joan breezing past him. She's just there in front of his desk when he walks in, looking at him in that arresting way of hers. Like a Gorgon, he thinks uncharitably, or a snake, hypnotising its lunch.  It's been a long time, he realises suddenly, since they've been alone together. 'Don', she says, voice hard, but fortunately Dawn's voice comes over the intercom and cuts her off, setting Don free from her gaze. 'I have Mr Cosgrove on line 1.' Don holds his hand up to stall Joan and heads over to the drinks cabinet, relieved, splashes out a whiskey. This calls for a celebration, after all. 'Thank you, Dawn,' he says, and picks up the phone. 'Kenny!' he all but shouts into the receiver, not looking at Joan, 'How's Detroit?'</p><p>The cheerful words feel unwieldy in his mouth, the way any fiction does until it’s been worn down enough to slip out naturally. He remembers the very last time he'd seen Ken, that last morning in Detroit. He'd dreaded seeing him again, felt sick all morning and not just from drink – even though he'd half convinced himself it was all some fucked-up dream. He'd been sitting on the end of the bed staring at the carpet for about twenty minutes, mind a screaming blank, when the soft knock had come on his door. ‘Morning Chief!' Ken had said when he'd opened it, before Don could even open his mouth to say – well, he wasn't sure what. 'Ready to ship out?' Don had nodded mutely, let the bellhop move past him to get his case. He couldn't stop staring at Ken, like he was trying to read it all on his face. On some insane impulse, he grabbed at his arm, right there in the hotel corridor. Ken's eyes widened, and the fabric of his suit jacket went taut against Don's fingers as he visibly fought the urge to flinch away. 'Sorry things got kind of hairy last night,' he'd said, a little too loud to be wholly convincing. ' But hey, you came here for a good time. Guess I don't have much of a head for drink anymore. The good news is, if I embarrassed myself, I've forgotten!' He'd got that fixed smile back, but his eyes darted past Don towards the elevator, looking for an out: there'd been a hint of mania in them and, Don had realised, suddenly, sickly, an edge of fear, even here, even of him. Stomach churning, he'd let go of Ken's arm and deliberately backed up.</p><p>Maybe Ken had relaxed, maybe he hadn't. He'd gone on smiling, and maybe there'd been less of an edge to it as he pulled out his cigarettes, tapped one out and lit up adroitly. 'Remember when Sterling lost his lunch in front of Nixon's guys?' he'd said, cigarette between his teeth, 'Talk about leading by example.' Don's own indiscretion at Mrs Sterling's funeral had hung between them invoked but unvoiced: they're redrawing the boundary lines, Don remembers thinking with a rush of relief, mapping out what they can and can't say to each other. This never happened. He'd felt a desperate flush of affection and approval for Ken. Together they'd turned and walked to the elevator, and ridden down in companionable silence. Don's chest had been too full of fierce warmth and the weight of his promise – <em>I'm going to fix this</em>– to speak, come up with polite nothings.</p><p>There'd been one more gauntlet to run, the elevator doors sliding open to reveal Chevy already in the lobby. Don had grit his teeth through goodbyes, and demands he returned, and finally through an argument about where they'd head for lunch once he left. 'If that's what you fellas want, I'm not gonna fight you on it,' he remembered Ken saying brightly, hands in his pockets.</p><p>'Hot dog!' Mikey had said, 'That's the difference between dining on the account and dining with the wife - account men love to tell you yes.'</p><p>Ken's smile had tightened, all but imperceptibly: if you weren't looking for it, maybe you'd never notice. But Don had been, and he did. 'Well, as my mother always says, sometimes you've got to go along to get along.' Ken had looked at his watch. 'And right now, Don should be getting along to the airport. It's a hell of a ride this time of day.'</p><p>'Go along to get along, huh?' one of the Jacks had said – nudge, nudge, wink, wink. 'Ma Cosgrove sounds like my kind of woman, Kenny.'</p><p>It had been then, as a cold shiver of disgust curled through him at the sight of Ken sighing out a laugh at that, shaking his head in a perfect imitation of frustrated indulgence, that the solution had hit Don. No-one could fix this for him: if Ken was pulled out now, if he ran away from this, he’d be running from it the rest of his life. He needed to stand up and demand respect, and he wouldn’t – he’d just keep playing defence – as long as he thought that he was all alone out here, outnumbered and underpowered. <em>I’m nothing to them</em>. He’s not just Ken Cosgrove, Don had thought in another flush of bright anger, the full-body rage he thought he’d exhausted yesterday evening: he’s a representative of something bigger, of something that matters. What he needs (and the thought had been accompanied by the not inconsiderable relief that always accompanied a good idea, a solution, finally – <em>what he needs</em>) is to be reminded of that – that he’s got the whole company behind him. What he needs is firepower, someone to hand him the bullets, and then he can be the one to stand firm and pull the trigger.</p><p>As his car had idled on the curb Ken had bent down to the window to bid him a final goodbye, the car window framing his friendly, distant face like he was some familiar stranger on the television. 'Give my love to New York,' he'd said, absently.</p><p>'Ken,' Don had replied, serious, grabbing his arm before he could turn away and disappear back into Detroit, alone and unreachable, 'Just hold on. It won't be long. Don't do anything... rash.'</p><p>Ken had grinned, his smile something between sharp and sad. 'I'm not going to die in Detroit,' he'd said, 'don't you worry.'</p><p>Don hadn't let go. 'You better not.'</p><p>'I can't,' Ken had said, straightening up, 'I can't die in Detroit, because it doesn't exist.' And he'd rapped on the top of the car, and it had pulled away.</p><p>Hearing his voice again now, filtering through the phone into the insistent solidity of Don’s office, feels something like a miracle. He sounds reasonably cheerful, but they both know how much that’s worth. Don is too pleased with himself, too full of his victory, to waste much time on pleasantries. ‘Listen,’ he says, cutting through the beginnings of an inquiry after either Megan or Peggy, gives him the news, and waits, expectant smile on his face.</p><p>There’s a silence on the other end of the line.</p><p>'I – that's great, Don. Spectacular. Thanks a lot.' When Don played this out in head, Ken sounded relieved and grateful, maybe a little awed, not confused and exhausted. He thought for sure he'd understand what this was about.</p><p>'We all thought that you deserved it, for all of the work you're doing out there on the front line.' He's very aware of Joan staring at him.</p><p>Ken's quiet for a long time. Then he laughs softly, a little desperately. 'Everyone? Even Pete?' It's obviously meant to be teasing, but his voice is strained. Don can clearly hear the question Ken isn't asking - Who knows what? 'Well,' he says, blindly feeling his way, 'some of us appreciate it more than others.'</p><p>He can feel his grand gesture falling apart, disintegrating like a wet paper bag in his hands. There's a sound on the other end of the line that Don is pretty sure is Ken sitting down on his bed. His bed in his hotel room, he thinks, stomach curdling a little. He opens his mouth to explain that it's okay now, that this is the beginning of the way out, but the words don’t come in time.</p><p>'Message received, Don. I understand.' There's a pause, then. 'Say thanks to the gang for me. I'll call Pete on Monday.' There's moment of silence, an opportunity for Don to say that one thing that will fix all of this, make this all disappear, if he can just work out - then a click, and Ken's gone.</p><p>Don's slow to put the receiver down, and even slower to turn and face Joan. She's just standing there with something burning in her eyes, something between fury and pity. Her voice is quiet and deadly. 'Well, what were you expecting?'</p><p>Don sits down, in the chair, deflated. He doesn't want to talk about this with her, doesn’t want to talk about it with anyone. It makes it feel more real. 'I thought he'd thank me, at least.'</p><p>She makes that little open-mouthed noise of indignation that all women seem to keep in their arsenal. 'For what? What <em>was</em>this, Don? Are you trying to stamp your name on him? You don't like the other boys playing with your toys?'</p><p>Don feels inexplicably exhausted: he just wants to shut his eyes against the whole world. 'With all due respect, you weren't there. He was asking me for power, for ammunition. That's what I've just given him!'</p><p>'No, Don, that's what <em>you </em>wanted for him. He wants to come home. You just told him to keep up the good work.' She laughs, derisively. 'Now he can't even quit!'</p><p>'I gave him what he needs to turn this round into a success!' He stares at her, can feel the vein in his temple throbbing dangerously as anger courses through him. 'What would you have preferred? That I tank the account? That's not what you said last time.'</p><p>Joan closes her eyes and breathes for a second, and he realises that until that moment, she wasn't sure what they were dealing with here, that the comparison to Jaguar has just confirmed her worst fears. 'You couldn't just pull him out?' she asks, voice only slightly uneven.</p><p>'I'm not his mother! This way he can stand up for himself, eventually get out of there with <em>some </em>pride intact.'</p><p>Joan's eyes fly open, and for a moment Don thinks she's going to spring at him. 'God!' she shouts, grinding it out like it hurts. 'You're insufferable! You want to play the white knight, but only if it means you get to call the shots! God forbid someone might actually profit from your help, because you’ll never forgive them! Do all the work yourself, but make sure you thank me for it!' She spreads her hands wildly, the jingle of her bracelets incongruously musical. 'And make sure <em>everyone </em>else knows you owe it all to me! You can't do anything without fucking advertising it!'</p><p>The overwhelming injustice of that last blow winds Don: he opens and closes his mouth a couple of times, mind racing to refute it. There's Peggy, he thinks, he never told anyone, but as soon as he thinks it he realises he can't bring it up without proving Joan right. He settles for hurling his glass across the room. Horribly, it hits the carpet and simply bounces and rolls under the coffee table. It doesn't even make much of a noise. Joan just looks at him, colour high in her cheeks and disdain all over her face.</p><p>'You don’t know what you’re talking about. I've thought about this more than you,' he snaps. 'This' – his palm smacks down loudly on the desk top – 'is the best possible solution.'</p><p>'Well, isn't that convenient?' Joan says, quietly. 'The best possible solution also means that you don’t have to see his face around the office, and you never have to think about what it is he's done for you, and you never have to be reminded how much you owe him. In fact, if you ever do <em>happen </em>to think of him, you can congratulate yourself on how much he owes you. Perfect.'</p><p>He opens his mouth, but she's already gone.</p><p> </p><p>Three weeks later, and most of Ken is back in New York anyway: he's taken a spray of shot to the face and come home, and Don's clammy fingers are leaving the corner of a magazine damp and misshapen as he turns the page.</p><p>
  <em>The wad of notes looked strange and clumsy in his father’s outstretched hand. He kept his other hand on the door handle.</em>
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  <em>'I'm sorry,' his father said. 'I'm sorry as anything, Tommy, but this is how it has to be.' He did look sorry, his face creased in a way that made Lawrence feel uncomfortable, like he'd caught John Bunyan crying. It was almost enough to make him turn around and walk away, just so he wouldn’t have to look at the man that had been an implacable God to him so crumbling and changed. Diminished.</em>
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  <em>‘Can’t you let me in?’ he said, but he already knew the answer. The warmth that had washed through him at the sight of his father’s face had drained away completely, leaving him light-headed. It had to be said, though; he had to hear it from the old man’s mouth. ‘You’ve got the tools out back, you could –‘</em>
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  <em>‘Take the money,’ his father said, loudly, like he was negotiating with a particularly quarrelsome tradesman. ‘Take the money. You sort yourself out and you can come back, but I’m not having this in the house.’</em>
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  <em>The walk to the road felt longer on the way back. Lawrence let the other man lead the way for a while. He kept his eyes on his own feet, and his mind a fuzzed-out blank: if he let himself think now he really might lose it. It took him by surprise when the other man stopped. He almost walked into his broad back. This is it, he thought dully, too tired to be afraid now. For the first time he remembered the fold of his father’s cash in his hand. If he wants it, he thought, it’s his.</em>
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  <em>But the man just walked over to a tree at the side of the track, gave it a friendly kick and then sat down, leaning his back against it. He looked up at Lawrence, then tugged sharply on the chain that connected them like he was heeling a dog. Lawrence stumbled and took a knee next to him, sticking out his free hand to stop himself landing on his face. The man laughed. ‘Jesus, you go down easy,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the staying power of a twelve-year-old girl.’ Lawrence didn’t say anything, just turned his palm over and stared at it. Little specks of rock had torn their way under the skin and stayed there, while red seeped out.  </em>
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  <em>‘Should have known you’d be a bleeder,’ the man said, in a tone of the mildest interest. ‘Now I’m taking a rest.’ His voice was so nonchalantly confident that Lawrence’s throat felt tight with anger and shame and fear. ‘You wake me when you’ve had your next bright idea.’ He closed his eyes.</em>
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  <em>Lawrence got comfortable in the dirt and sat there for a while, feeling the sun on his face and the pain in his palm and the red rawness of his wrist. Eventually, he looked at the ax: its head was poking coquettishly out of the man’s jacket. It would be understandable, he thought, he could explain. An animal in a snare would do anything, anything. You did what you had to do to get home. </em>
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  <em>It was an awkward business. It was quicker than he’d imagined. When he was done, he sat there looking at what was left. </em>
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  <em>Somewhere not too far away a lawnmower roared into life, and the man stirred and woke. When he saw what Lawrence had done, his laugh was full of pleasure and surprise. He stretched out his arm and grinned at the empty ring of steel as it swung, merrily, from side to side, like it was waving Lawrence goodbye. Lawrence felt somehow embarrassed, sitting there next to him, cross-legged like a child, squinting against the sun while blood leaked into the grit. He stood up awkwardly, staggered, leaned his shoulder heavily against the tree: dark blots wriggled across his vision. But he could still see the gory lump that had been his thumb lying inertly in the dirt at his feet, and so could the man. He looked down at it and laughed, then heaved himself up, tucking the empty cuff away in his sleeve almost absentmindedly. </em>
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  <em>'Well, so long, Tommy,' he said, brightly, and took one last look at the wet little shape on the ground. He prodded at it with the battered toe of his shoe. 'You're a pretty obliging kind of fellow.' Then he turned and ambled off down the dirt track.</em>
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  <em>Lawrence pulled out his handkerchief and clumsily wrapped what was left of his hand, turning his face into the tree for a moment. The bark was rough against his forehead. His right side throbbed and his thoughts were thin and watery, running together in a stream, but it was done: the man was gone. He didn't think about the thing that lay on the ground in front of him, didn't consider picking it up. Some things were worth living without. In a minute, he told himself, he would stand up and start walking home.</em>
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  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>or: Man Who Thought He'd Lost All Hope Loses Last Additional Bit Of Hope He Didn't Know He Still Had</p><p>ever fuck around and find a decade old prompt on a long-dead kinkmeme, lose your mind and write 15k words? if by some miracle that prompter is still around and ever stumbles across this you're welcome and sorry<br/><br/>did ken step in front of that gun? would he subtweet don draper in a thinly veiled substitute for the new yorker? would michael ginsberg /read/ a thinly veiled substitute for the new yorker? only you can decide</p></blockquote></div></div>
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